How to Avoid Data Entry Mistakes

Data entry tasks tend to be low on the totem pole in terms of business operational priorities. However, data entry is still one of the most critical day-to-day operations for companies across the industry. Everything from customer and sales data to financial information relies heavily on data entry, meaning a single error can have huge ramifications for your company.

Even with the broad applications of operational automation, many data entry positions are still held by humans. Unfortunately, wherever a company employs people, there’s the potential for human error, and data entry errors are some of the costliest errors to companies.

Fortunately, there are many ways to avoid data input errors and promote accuracy among employees. By understanding why manual data entry errors happen and learning ways to avoid them, your company can more efficiently reduce entry errors and enhance data integrity across your enterprise. Getting effective data entry software that can capture documents, automate workflow or assist mobile transactions ensures the data entry does not get overlooked or forgotten.

Common Data Entry Errors

No matter how much your employees double-check their work, mistakes always slip through the cracks. Though your staff should understand the importance of accuracy for your company’s operational efficiency, fatigue or simple slip-ups can result in the occasional error. The most common of these mistakes are transcription and transposition errors:

Transcription errors: These types of errors occur when information is input the wrong way and tends to be more common when transcribing words rather than numerical data. This kind of mistake includes typos, repetition and deletion. Transcription is an especially common problem when employees type quickly — if they hit the wrong key, it’s too easy for them not to notice. This kind of error is also common in word processing programs that automatically correct words within certain contexts, such as Microsoft Word.

Transposition Errors: This type of mistake occurs when information is input in the wrong order and tends to happen when people type numbers rather than words. For example, instead of typing 123, the employee types 132. Again, this is a frequent error for employees who type too quickly to notice mistakes as they go.

Although most employees make these mistakes in good faith, their errors can still result in severe consequences for your company. Inaccurate data can take time and resources to correct, and if left uncorrected can lead to lost profits, lost business and even lawsuits. With your company planning strategies around your data, it’s more important than ever to reduce human error in data entry.

While errors are inevitable, you can minimize their occurrence and their effects on your business by implementing some simple business practices. Below, we’ve outlined how to avoid document input mistakes through managing your employees, as well as how to make data input faster and more efficient through process management.

Preventing Errors Through Employee Management

Avoiding errors often comes down to the employees, as they are the ones often making the mistakes. While you have to expect some mistakes now and then, major errors should never be the norm within your company. Fortunately, your business can take some necessary steps to help make sure your employees are equipped to minimize errors on their end.

Train Them on the Importance of Data

The first step for avoiding data entry errors is to express to employees how valuable the information is. Before employees start entering data, you must train them on why this information is so important and how inaccuracy can negatively affect the business. This basic understanding of the relevance and importance of their position helps employees feel more responsible for the data, improving their overall effectiveness and accuracy.

Provide a Good Working Environment

Discomfort, fatigue and other factors can severely impair an employee’s ability to work accurately. Eyestrain can result in employees’ vision becoming impaired, while fatigue from muscle strain can lead to them pressing the wrong keys. To help combat these problems, your company should:

Provide employees with a comfortable and healthy space.

Offer them regular breaks to refresh and reset before they return to work.

In total, these factors can result in your employees working more accurately and for longer periods.

Avoid Overloading

While it is always good to have goals for your team, setting unrealistic ones can put undue stress on them. The manager in charge of a team should be sure to set realistic targets since people can only do so much within a day. Putting too much pressure on employees to meet an unrealistic goal can result in them working too fast, tiring too quickly and making more mistakes. If there’s more work to be done, delegate it appropriately while allowing for appropriate deadlines, so employees don’t feel rushed.

Hire Sufficient Staff

In hand with the previous point, you should always have enough employees on staff to handle the incoming workload. No matter how efficient or capable your employees may be, they have their limits. When overworked or pushed past their capacity, they are more likely to commit mistakes.

The longer and more often you overwork employees, the more frequent those mistakes will be. In addition to causing problems for your company, this constant overload can make employees resentful, contributing to employee turnover. To keep everyone happy, keep enough people on staff to handle the amount of work the company needs to get done.

Prioritize Accuracy Over Speed

While speed is a good thing to emphasize to keep workflow going, accuracy is of more importance when it comes to data entry. Rushing a task as detail-oriented as data entry is bound to end in more errors. Instead, focus on accuracy as their primary objective by setting accuracy goals for your team. These should be realistic goals upon which managers base employee evaluations. Though work speed should also be evaluated, the majority of focus should be on doing the job correctly if you want to foster a more accuracy-oriented work environment.

Use Software Tools

When possible, make the most of the software on hand. Intelligent Character Recognition (ICR) and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology, among other similar software tools, helps reduce the amount of work for your data entry employees by automatically extracting data.

While this doesn’t get rid of their job entirely, it helps your employees by reducing their workload, reducing the chances for them to make mistakes and allowing them more time to read and analyze the data. Other useful software tools include automatic error reports, which can check the input data to make sure it fits specified parameters. For example, if an entered social security number falls short of the required nine digits, a pop-up on the system can alert the employee to the error so they can fix it immediately.

Double-Check Work

Double-checking all completed work should always be standard operating procedure, especially for data entry positions. The data entry process should involve a senior employee or manager to double-check the work to make sure that it is accurate. While this may not always be feasible when it comes to large amounts of data, regular detailed checks can identify areas of potential improvement. These controls can also assist in determining areas where the company could update its systems to help simplify employee processes

While employees tend to be the primary perpetrators of mistakes, inefficient or redundant processes can be equally to blame. By streamlining your company processes, you can begin reducing human error in data entry.

Identify Primary Sources of Inaccuracies

One of the first steps to fixing your processes is identifying where the sticking points are. Look at data entry errors, statistics, and patterns to determine the primary internal and external sources of data inaccuracy. Finding these patterns can help point to the sources of error, which you can then go about fixing with changes to either processes or management techniques.

Use Data Profiling

Data profiling, in essence, is the process of analyzing data to make sure it is:

Complete

Correct

Unique

Reasonable

Consistent

This type of analysis helps find defects in the presented data by sensing values that fall outside of an accepted range or established pattern. Data profiling programs identify these potentially incorrect values and keep them from flowing downstream by flagging them for review. This helps prevent companies from working with potentially incorrect data.

Perform Causal Analysis

In addition to data profiling, companies should use an error analysis process to analyze the targeted data. There are two primary methodologies for performing error analyses:

Error cluster analysis tries to narrow down the sources of errors by analyzing the inaccurate data set to identify the error of origin.

Data event analysis studies events where data is created and changed to try to determine the cause of the problem. Both are valuable methodologies that can be used together or separately, depending on the goal of your analytical program.

Reduce Data Redundancy

Entering information is a time-consuming process for your employees, so lessening the amount of useless data they need to input can benefit them immensely. Cut out any unnecessary data, so only useful data is processed. One of the best ways to do this is by regularly reviewing and revising your forms and documents to check that all the requested data is relevant and necessary for your business processes.

Forms that require unnecessary data should be revised so redundant or irrelevant data is removed. But how can forms help us reduce data-entry errors, you may wonder. By eliminating redundant or unnecessary forms, you minimize the possibility for double-entry and cut down the amount of data your employees need to process. This reduces the chances for your employees to input errors in the system.

Standardize Processes

Standardizing both your data collection and data entry processes helps improve your overall accuracy and consistency. By maintaining standard processes, your employees know what to expect and look for with each form, and they know what protocols to follow. This helps them fall into a pattern of operation, allowing them to work both quickly and accurately. In addition to being helpful for your employees, standardization is necessary if you’re looking to automate any of your data entry processes.

Monitor Progress

Whenever you change any process, you should never stop monitoring your error reports and error patterns. Continuous monitoring of these reports helps your company identify the success of any improved processes, as well as any additional room for improvement. Monitoring also helps prevent further mistakes and acts as an efficient feedback system for both the company and its employees. As a whole, this continuous cycle of surveillance and improvement can help your business create the most effective and accurate system possible.

Enable Automation

Entering data manually is expensive in both labor and company resource allocation. Additionally, the monotony of the work makes it a highly error-prone job with a high turnover rate. To help combat the costs associated with manual data entry tasks, automating as much data entry processes as possible is the best way to go.

OCR and ICR systems, as described in the previous section, can help your employees in the work they already do, while complete data entry automation packages can replace some of your data entry workers altogether. With these automated systems, you remove the human factor, reducing errors, labor costs and long-term risks to your organization.

Regularly Update Automated Systems

If you do use an automated system, make sure you upgrade the system on a regular basis. Data harvesting and analytic functions are often updated by their programmers to fit current industry standards. Without these updates, automated programs are more likely to make mistakes or become vulnerable to viruses or malware. To avoid these problems, update your software whenever a new version comes out. At the very least, update your software when major updates come out to fit new standards within your industry.

Avoid Errors With a System That Works for You

The process of data entry is an indispensable part of any organization’s business processes. While human employees have been doing the work for a long time, at the end of the day, the best way to improve input accuracy is to use an automated system.

If you’re looking for a quality system to help minimize your manual data entry needs, Vanguard Systems’ automation software can help you. Vanguard Systems offers a highly user-friendly software solution that can be used on any platform, meaning you can integrate Vanguard Systems into your current business operations immediately. The system helps your company manage its workflow more efficiently by automating data entry and collection processes, giving you results without the labor expenses.

Skeptical about Vanguard Systems’ abilities? Sign up for a free demonstration today and see it in action for yourself. We can schedule it as soon as possible, with no obligation to you.

Learn what Vanguard Systems’ software solution can do for your business. Contact us online or call us at 800-445-1418 today.